As an alternative approach to processing about 150 logos manually, if anyone has enough Gimp scripting knowledge to cook up a recipe that I could run, then that would possibly save a lot of painstaking labor.

Ant wrote on Aug 30, 2020, 22:36:
What about top users like submitters, commenters, etc.? I better be BN's #1 submitter.

You probably are.
But that would require parsing the text of 214K (and counting) stories, for a variety of strings, links, tags, and contexts. Far more involved than just querying statistics from database tables, and prone to be inaccurate and incomplete. So I'm not going to invest the time/energy.

jdreyer wrote on Aug 29, 2020, 01:27:
If I may suggest a couple of additions to the stats page:

1) Top 10 most commented Stories

As mentioned recently, that has existed for very many years already.

jdreyer wrote on Aug 29, 2020, 01:27:
2) Top 10 commenters by numbers of post

We obviously thought of that but decided against a feature that could be viewed by some as an incentive to "spam" posts, just to make it into a top-10 (or XX) list.

El Pit wrote on Aug 29, 2020, 04:07:

jdreyer wrote on Aug 29, 2020, 01:23:

The Half Elf wrote on Aug 28, 2020, 21:09:
9 DAYS WITHOUT AN UPDATE?!? OMG YOU FINALLY TOOK SOME DAYS OFF! YAY!

Just keep in mind that three of those days were due to the recent power outage Blue suffered.

Even then he took his cell, walked out into the storm to find a place from where he could give us a small update about the situation at the Blue tower.

Exactly, so they are not among the infamous(?) 9 days -- those happened longer ago.

Acleacius wrote on Aug 27, 2020, 09:50:
What I mean is, for both SON and PT, let them be new categories in All Forums. So there would be a total of 8 threads, instead of the current 6.
This so each would show more than just 10 threads. They each would list like New Comments, the last 30 per page, at least that's how mine are listed.

In addition to Blue's remarks, two points:
- SoN are indeed flagged manually (but somewhat arbitrarily), but PT aren't: it's a simple query of the topics started in the past week (News Comments) or 4 weeks (other forums) ordered by post count. So after they expire or get superseded by more popular threads, there's no record they were in the list. Thus it is technically impossible to create a separate history "forum" of them.
- Clarifying terminology: the All Forums index shows forums (or boards), not threads. Individual forums show threads (aka topics) which list posts (or comments).

So only a SoN history "view" would be feasible but require a rather different approach in database querying and coding than a normal forum, which combined with its somewhat arbitrary nature led to the conclusion Blue mentions.

Blue wrote on Aug 27, 2020, 08:00:

Acleacius wrote on Aug 27, 2020, 07:14:
Blue, any chance STORIES OF NOTE and POPULAR THREADS could each get their own category, in All Forums?

That way we could see a complete list, instead of just the most recent 10 stories? The titles to the left could be Clickable Links to the categories.

I'm not following what you are suggesting.

Me neither, just a note that the news archive sidebar already serves up the all-time top 10 of popular threads.

A top-111428 of all 111428 news threads seems... uhh... impractical. So please elaborate.

Ant wrote on Aug 6, 2020, 23:20:
What happens if you go down too with Blue? Who takes over?

I'm counting on two separate continents not going down at the same time. But if they do, the world has more important things to worry about than this one website.

Mr. Tact wrote on Aug 6, 2020, 15:20:
And we are back...

Some bot running on Amazon EC2 was hammering the server. Just returned home after several hours to find an IP-block ban was in order...

Kosumo wrote on Aug 5, 2020, 18:03:

Neutronbeam wrote on Aug 5, 2020, 17:53:
No veo problem El Presidente, just be safe and well!

Thanks

Your claim to that title was denied.

RichKiddey wrote on Aug 5, 2020, 09:40:

No comment about your post, but a warning: the spam link in your profile and signature is not acceptable.

The Half Elf wrote on Aug 4, 2020, 21:19:

Kosumo wrote on Aug 4, 2020, 20:45:

Neutronbeam wrote on Aug 4, 2020, 20:32:
Y'all just be safe El President!

I'm prepared to be the new El President for life if Blue does not post again in the next two hours.

I think Frans will have something to say about that... *gets popcorn*

Rest assured, the BlueTower is extremely well guarded.

ByteCrawler wrote on Aug 3, 2020, 20:09:
Sure! Check this out, it's a good beginning -- https://blog.mxtoolbox.com/ & https://mxtoolbox.com/dmarc/spf/spf-record-tags

According to an SPF lookup of bluesnews.com the current record reads:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ip4:216.45.58.170 ~all

So it's including Google which I'm confused about unless there's something in the backend (like advertising) that may send as the bluesnews.com domain. Because according to your MX record you are not using Google for mail services, here's that record:

10 mx1.netsolmail.net

mx1.netsolmail.net resolves to 172.65.252.97 which isn't included in the SPF record and should be. Not sure what 216.45.58.170 (resolves server35.bluesnews.com) is, my guess it's the website which also emails as bluesnews.com.

The current SPF record is set to ~all which is a SoftFail (receiving mail servers for the most part will accept them but mark as spam, unless they set it otherwise). As opposed to you setting a HardFail which tells any receiving server if it's not coming from a server specified in the SPF then kick it back. General practice is to keep SoftFail. Anyways my guess is your SPF record should look like this (including Google or not is up to you depending on if you're worried you're using a Google service that's potentially sending as bluesnews.com).

v=spf ip4:216.45.58.170 ip4:172.65.252.97 include:_spf.google.com ~all

Let me know if you have any more questions.

The google include is in all the tutorials I saw, including your spf-record-tags link above. I suppose in our situation it is more like a 'could-come-in-handy-but-is-probably-not-needed' entry.
The MX record is for receiving mail, not sending, so I don't think that needs to be in the Sender PF entry. If you still think otherwise, please explain why.

The bluesnews.com IP entry is the main reason I set up SPF, because lots of script-generated mails (welcome info, password change, reports, notifications) originate from the server.

And Blue sends via smtp.bluesnews.com, so that had to be added. The TXT record has now been updated.

Thanks for the input.
Of course, as you say, none of this could have influenced the reception of mails last week. I encountered a few warnings about delayed delivery too, but none bounced in the end. So I'm guessing it was a temporary hiccup at netsolmail.net.

ByteCrawler wrote on Aug 3, 2020, 15:09:
Depending on what the bounced email is reporting it could be a range of things. However I did do an SPF record lookup for bluesnews.com and it seems to be missing the sending MX server in the record. Depending on how other mail servers are they can either a) classify the message as spam and let it through or b) bounce the message. But that's when sending from bluesnews.com not so much sending to.

Where/how did you do that? Please enlighten me, I don't have much experience in this area.

eRe4s3r wrote on Jul 31, 2020, 21:15:
It's fixed now on top of uBlock Origin filter-lists blocking it.

No idea what you're saying here, please elaborate.

eRe4s3r wrote on Jul 31, 2020, 21:15:
But yeah, good example of malicious ad networks.

Accusing anyone is premature. It's not even sure this problem (experienced by only a handful of people so far) is caused by the ad script, let alone intentionally and with malice.
There's also a theory that FF79 introduced something (coincidentally around the same time as the ad script was updated) which now throws a wrench in the works.

Dacron wrote on Jul 28, 2020, 12:29:
Doesn't create an issue, but occasionally when moping the mouse between pages of discussion, for a split second the mouse enlarges 3-4x the size of normal, and takes on a yellow (like the page number I'm hovering over) colour. On chrome with no apps/extensions.

Sounds like a browser glitch. The BN site does nothing with the mouse, except showing 'pointer' style when hovering over the "Manage Cookie Settings" modal 'link' in the footer.

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 23, 2020, 07:41:
I was making a joke, obviously not a good one, in reference to how you do a great job here that you should be able to fix an overload on gog's side.
Sorry for any misunderstanding.

No problem, this wasn't about the joke (but thanks anyway), only about me not following the news forum.

RedEye9 wrote on Jun 12, 2020, 10:56:
Error 503 Backend fetch failed

Frans, can you get on that when you have a minute.

I only found this because of a search. A random remark in a random news topic flies entirely under my radar. I don't read news comments by default, only sporadically when the news story is relevant (like Blue describing a new site feature).

If you want to draw my attention to something, use a new topic in the General Discussion forum.

See follow-up here.

jdreyer wrote on Jun 3, 2020, 16:52:

Frans wrote on Jun 2, 2020, 16:22:

jdreyer wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 17:39:

MeanJim wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 16:41:
I don't know if this recent tweak changed it or not (since I haven't posted a message in weeks), but comment text box can now only be resized vertically. I like to stretch it out both vertically and horizontally when posting because I find the default size too small.

Yup, just confirmed in Chrome and FF. Nice catch. KX or Frans, any comment?

This was changed on May 19 after Kxmode found a (potential) user interface problem with resizing horizontally. Perhaps he can elaborate?

MeanJim, what's usually the approximate width of your browser window?

Just wanted to continue this conversation.

The HTML input form wasn't properly connected to the CSS grid. Fixed now, and horizontal textarea resizing enabled again.

jdreyer wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 17:39:

MeanJim wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 16:41:
I don't know if this recent tweak changed it or not (since I haven't posted a message in weeks), but comment text box can now only be resized vertically. I like to stretch it out both vertically and horizontally when posting because I find the default size too small.

Yup, just confirmed in Chrome and FF. Nice catch. KX or Frans, any comment?

This was changed on May 19 after Kxmode found a (potential) user interface problem with resizing horizontally. Perhaps he can elaborate?

MeanJim, what's usually the approximate width of your browser window?